This application is in response to Notice Number NOT-OD-09-058, Notice Title: NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications. The parent project investigates the development of bimodal bilingualism by studying sign language and spoken language in young deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) and young hearing children in deaf families (codas). The research uses both longitudinal spontaneous production data and experimental tasks with children between the ages of 1 year, 6 months and 7 years to ask: How does early exposure to Sign Language and spoken language affect development in each modality in signing deaf children with a CI? Is the language development of bimodal bilinguals with fully accessible input constrained in ways similar to that of unimodal bilinguals? To what extent does the linguistic development of deaf children with CIs who receive early bimodal input resemble that of hearing bimodal bilinguals (codas)? We study the development of bimodal bilingualism by examining children's linguistic abilities in speech and sign. Because there is no commonly accepted writing system for ASL, sign researchers generally rely on a system of glossing;however, traditional transcription does not assign a consistent gloss for each sign, but different glosses depending on context and other aspects of the signed utterance. This means that it is very difficult for researchers to identify the locations of interest in a transcript using a search function to discover all occurrences of a particular sign. Analysis must proceed at a much slower pace of handsearching transcripts one utterance at a time. In order to facilitate and expand the analysis of data collected in the parent project, the competitive revision application proposes the development of an ID gloss lexicon containing the vocabulary items used most frequently by the children we are studying. ID glosses are labels chosen to represent each sign root systematically, so that every use of the sign has the same label, despite contextual or morphological differences which affect how the sign is interpreted. By using ID glosses in our transcripts, we will be able to conduct our analyses more efficiently, using a wider range of data. The proposed ID gloss lexicon will address the problem of transcript searchability and greatly facilitate the analysis of data to be collected in the parent project. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project asks whether deaf children who have a cochlear implant can become bilingual in both spoken language and sign language in the same way that hearing children can become bilingual in speech and sign if their families use both languages. It is crucial for parents and educators to know about the ways in which this kind of bilingual situation can progress so that they can make informed choices. The competitive renewal supports this goal by making the analyses of child data more rapid and more accurate.